Services

Case Study: Integrated Recruitment with PRLab

 

PRLab is a start-up Public Relations agency in Amsterdam that was growing rapidly and needed to add reliable team members while still maintaining their company culture that had been carefully cultivated.  The goal was to integrate into the company, gain a deep understanding of their hiring needs and the dynamics of each team in order to head-hunt, recruit and hire candidates that would contribute to the company’s growth without altering the company’s core values and culture.  Positions needed ranged from Operations Manager to adding more PR executives to different teams as the company expanded globally into Sweden and Germany.  Therefore, recruitment in different markets was also a large part of this case.

 

Approach:

1. Met with relevant team members and gathered information about the needs that they had for each position to be filled, both in a practical and social aspects.

2. Compiled candidates via head-hunting, LinkedIn postings and in house referrals.

3. The first interview was used to weed out candidates that were out of budget, unable to meet the position needs or were obviously mismatched for the company’s culture.

4. Tasks were then assigned to candidates which were reviewed by hiring managers.  There was no information about the candidates attached to the tasks to prevent bias.  

5. Tasks approved by hiring managers were then called in for a second interview with the hiring manager joining in.

6. Candidates that were approved by the hiring managers were then brought in for a final interview that included one of the higher-level executives, CEO or Operations manager.

7. Once all parties within the company were satisfied, offers were given, negotiations were conducted, and onboarding began.

 

 

Challenges:

• Different markets have different employment standards and different cultures have different interviewing styles which proved to require extra research and tailoring approaches for each position.

• The changing needs of the company proved to require adaptive candidates that were flexible in job descriptions.

• As it was a start-up, salary offers tended to be on the lower end, so recruitment of experienced candidates proved to be a challenge as well.

Solutions:

• Researching and getting real-time feedback from candidates and market experts was used to gain a better understanding of the hiring styles in Sweden vs The Netherlands, as well as the more unique needs of the Global team who needed candidates who were fluent in English but culturally adaptable to a variety of markets.  

• When interviewing candidates, I used transparency and specific questioning to narrow down the candidates that would be more flexible and adaptable to a start-up environment, thus preventing issues down the road with retention.  

• Rather than focusing on the lower salary, I pressed the idea of growth within the company as well as the growth of the company with emphasis on the candidate being able to see the impact made directly on the growth as tools to recruit motivated candidates.

 

Results:

Overall, I was able to recruit candidates that not only grew the company and added value to each team, I was also able to do so within the salary restraints.  I added an operations manager for the whole company that proved to be invaluable, as well as added members to the Swedish, Dutch and Global teams respectively.  The candidates that I recruited proved to be adaptable, motivated, hard-working and committed to the company as well as fit in well with the company culture maintaining the “PRLab community”.